


Ups and Downs (and then more downs)

by mosylu



Series: Heavy Lifting [5]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: 4x16 reaction, Gen, how did we not get this on screen, the support and validation that Iris deserved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 06:14:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14206887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: Iris's first day as a superhero was not her best day ever. Caitlin puts her back together in more ways than one.





	Ups and Downs (and then more downs)

**Author's Note:**

> You know, that whole episode was about Iris, but she still had to comfort Barry and listen to Ralph be an idiot, and nobody said, "hey, how are you doing?" Our girl had a really rough first day as the Flash and needed someone to support her for a change. Title from I’m About to Come Alive by Train.

When Barry stepped on Caitlin’s foot for the third time in two minutes, Iris said, “Babe, I need new clothes. Can you please go get me some?”

“Sure,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, sure.” He shifted his weight in a way that Iris had seen several times today, the gesture that said he was about to bolt at the speed of sound and be back before her heart had finished its beat.

Of course, all he did was take a regular old human step. The familiar mix of bewilderment, disappointment, and dismay flickered across his face.

She gave him a little smile. “No rush,” she said softly.

He mustered up a return smile and walked out of the med lab, headed for the lockers downstairs with the spare sweats.

“Thank you,” Caitlin said, with deep feeling.

Iris shot her a smile. “I thought this might go faster without him hovering and clutching my hand. Not that I mind a little pampering, but - “

“Yeah, I know,” Caitlin said. “He doesn’t know how to stay out of the way like you do.”

Iris wrinkled her nose. "So, is that a compliment, or . . . ?"

Caitlin blinked. "That's how it was meant."

Iris laughed. She'd gotten to know Caitlin's sometimes-sideways priorities so much better in the past few months, and she'd gotten to where she enjoyed it. "Then I'll take it."

Caitlin smiled a little and focused on her x-ray. “Well, your tibia is broken,” she said. “I was pretty sure, but this confirms it.”

Iris winced as pain shot up her leg, as if in reaction to Caitlin's words. “Bad?”

“Not great. It’ll take several hours to heal.”

She shouldn’t be shocked by that, not after the past few years of watching Barry bounce back from injuries that would have landed a non-speedster in the hospital for weeks. But it was different when it was her body, and she could watch the bruise bloom and then shrink away on her wrist, and she could feel the itch of broken skin knitting together.

“I’ve got to set it fast,” Caitlin said, “or it’ll - “

“Heal wrong, I know.” Iris set her teeth and briefly wished she hadn’t sent Barry away quite so fast. “Do it.”

Some minutes later, with the bone set and a splint strapped on to stabilize it, Iris wiped her sweaty face and took a few breaths.

“How are you doing?” Caitlin asked. She’d moved on to her less serious injuries, and now was cleaning blood away from what had been a deep, painful cut on Iris’s arm.

Exhausted? Humiliated? In pain? But most of all - _“Starving,”_ Iris said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got an entire roasted chicken stashed away in one of those cabinets?” She wouldn’t be surprised. Caitlin seemed to produce all sorts of unexpected objects from her lab.

“I can offer you a nutrient bar.” Caitlin rummaged for a moment, and held out a bar wrapped in aluminum foil.

Iris studied it doubtfully. “Barry always complains about the way they taste, but they can’t be that bad, can’t they?” She bit off a corner, coughed, and almost spat it out. “Oh. Noooo. Oh my god.”

“Cisco’s trying,” Caitlin apologized, throwing the blood-stained gauze square into the trash and stripping off her gloves. “But every time he improves the taste, the nutritional quality goes down.”

“Maybe the reason they work is because they kill your appetite.”

Caitlin laughed, but said, “I’ve tested them. Ten thousand calories a bar.”

Iris froze in the act of taking another bite. Her stomach growled again. She remembered that she’d been training all day, even before the fire, and although she’d eaten a huge lunch, now her stomach felt like it was devouring her from the inside out.

“So weird to think of calories as good things,” she said, taking the bite and forcing herself to chew before swallowing.

“They are good things,” Caitlin said. “When you get the amount you need.”

“I know that in my head, but the diet industry is powerful.” Iris took another bite, defiantly - take _that_ , lo-cal everything - and almost choked. “God, it’s so bad, though.”

Caitlin handed her a bottle of water. “Small bites and wash them down,” she said. “And when you’re done - ” She opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a bright pink tampon box.

“Uh, that’s not my brand, and that’s not a problem at the moment.” What if speed affected her cycle too? Oh, great.

Caitlin smirked and opened the box to show it full of Hershey’s miniatures.

Iris felt her eyes widen. “You’re diabolical,” she said, and choked. “I - that wasn’t - I meant the guys would probably all chop off their fingers before they even touched that box.”

“I know,” Caitlin said, but the smirk had dissolved. She set the box next to Iris on the bed and started cleaning up.

Iris took the prescribed small bites and watched her.  “Sorry about your clothes,” she said eventually. The pants were in a cut-up heap in the corner of the room. The sweater was torn, blood-stained, and stank of smoke.

Caitlin just shrugged. “They were old, anyway.”

And soft and cuddly and - “I can replace them.”

“No, no, of course not. I don’t need you to do that. You obviously couldn’t have gone out there in this.” She plucked at the Star Labs sweatshirt that Iris had swapped with her. “It’s fine, really.”

Iris finally finished the noisome nutrition bar and picked out three Mr. Goodbars. She wanted to eat the whole box, wrappers and all, but she forced herself to remember that this was Caitlin’s stash. “Thanks for being so supportive.“

“You’ve had a big day.”

“Yeah, and I capped it off by totally biffing my first save.”

Caitlin straightened up and turned around. “You didn’t biff anything.”

Iris pointed at her splinted leg and raised her eyebrows.

“Please,” Caitlin said. “Barry broke his wrist on his first day as a speedster. And he ran into a laundry truck. Different occasions.”

“After he’d stopped a bad guy and saved me from being pancaked,” Iris said gloomily, biting her first chocolate bar in half. “Me? I completely blanked. If it weren’t for Cisco, I would have been toast. Literally.”

“That’s happened to Barry, too,” Caitlin said. “A lot. Ease up on yourself.”

“I can’t,” Iris sighed, and ate the rest of the Mr. Goodbar. “I couldn’t kill the fire, I couldn’t phase through that piece of ceiling - I knew what to do, I just _couldn’t_.”

Caitlin sat down next to her. “Listen, okay? There are five people going home tonight because of you. Home, and not to the morgue. Do you think that’s nothing?”

Iris shook her head. “I know that’s the most important thing.”

“Damn straight it is,” and Iris knew she was serious because Caitlin rarely swore. “Barry didn’t kill a fire like that until he’d been a speedster for weeks. He didn’t phase through objects until he’d been doing this for over a year. Again, this is your _first day_ , Iris. Are you really measuring yourself against the Flash as he is now?”

“Of course I am,” Iris said brightly. “And I have to do it backwards and in heels, too.”

Caitlin scowled.

She sighed and ate her last candy bar. “I know what you’re saying here. But you know how it is.”

Caitlin’s scowl softened. She’d spent much of her adult life as the only woman in the room and constantly having to prove her right to be there. “I do know how it is.”

Iris fiddled with the yellow-and-silver wrapper. “Well. This has been good for me, I guess. Before, I just holed up here all nice and safe while told you all what to do and where to go, and I had no idea what it was really like. Now I do.”

But instead of agreeing, Caitlin frowned. “That doesn’t sound like my friend Iris. Whose words are those?”

“It’s true.”

“Who said that to you? Was it Barry?”

“No, of course not.” She wondered for a split second if Barry thought that, and pushed it out of her head. “Ralph might’ve been venting a little bit.”

“Ralph?” Caitlin let out a laugh that sounded like ice breaking. “Ralph goes out in the field, sure. When we _drag_ him. Otherwise, he’s hiding in the basement. He’s not up here in the cortex, seeing all the work we do, and he’s certainly not lifting a finger to help. He can shut his big fat mouth.”

The words settled into her stomach, dissolving the rock that Ralph’s contempt had left there. Caitlin was right. What was she even doing, listening to him? “Thanks,” she said.

“Anytime. I mean that. Don’t ever think that you haven’t been important. We haven’t had a leader in a long time and now that we do, it’s so different.”

“What about Barry?”

“Barry’s good at many things,” Caitlin said. “But he’s a hero, and that’s different than being a leader. He has a terrible tendency to pick one thing to focus on and forget about everything else. It’s not bad, necessarily, but it does mean that whatever’s not important to him gets ignored.”

Iris opened her mouth, feeling as if she should defend her husband, but - actually. Yes. Caitlin had a point about that. How many times in her life had she had to call Barry’s attention to something that had whiffed right past his head because he’d decided it wasn’t important?

“I mean, I do that too!” Caitlin exclaimed. “And so does Cisco. It’s a blind spot for all of us. But you see the big picture. You see all our pieces and how they fit together. Maybe it’s the journalism, I don’t know.”

Iris felt a pang at the thought of her old job. She’d left it behind for a good reason, she told herself. Her priorities had changed, she hadn’t had enough in her to do both. Good reasons. 

But her fingers still itched for a keyboard sometimes.

“We need that,” Caitlin was saying. “We need a big-picture person.”

“Harry,” Iris suggested.

“Has all the compassion, patience, and empathy of a seagull who wants your French fries. He’s very, very smart, I know, and it’s saved us several times. But intelligence doesn’t make a leader, just the same as heroism doesn’t.”

Iris looked down to find that she’d rolled the candy wrappers into a ball. She tossed them at the trash can and leaned forward. “I hear what you’re saying and I appreciate it, I do. But being out there today, in the middle of everything, before I messed it up - ”

Caitlin made a warning noise in her throat.

“Before it went wrong,” Iris corrected herself. “I felt … I don’t know. I felt like I’d found something I’ve been missing.”

The doctor studied her. “Does that mean you want to stay the Flash?”

“Barry’s the Flash,” Iris said sharply, almost defensively.

She held up her hands in a peacemaking gesture. “Of course he is. I meant, would you want to keep the speed if Barry could also get his back?”

Iris frowned over it. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, out there today, I felt like I was wearing a costume that didn’t belong to me.”

“Well,” Caitlin said. “My clothes, Jesse’s mask - you kind of were.”

“Besides that,” Iris said. “The speed was fun, but it didn’t feel like me.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I just have to get used to it.”

Caitlin reached out and picked up a pad of graph paper. “Should I be trying to figure out a way for you to keep your speed?”

Iris held up her hand. “Right now, I want you to focus on finding out if there’s a way to reverse what Melting Point did. If all he has to do is touch two people, Barry and I definitely aren’t the first and we won’t be the last.”

“On it,” Caitlin said.

Iris wondered if it could even be done. But Caitlin had the set to her mouth that meant she was going to work all night if she had to. 

Barry came back, with a new Star Labs sweatshirt and a pair of loose shorts that would fit over the splint. Caitlin shooed him away and helped her into them, working carefully around her leg. Even so, her leg ached and throbbed by the time they were done.

“Don’t suppose you ever found a painkiller that would work on speedsters?” Iris asked hopefully, wincing.

Caitlin gave her a sympathetic look. “It’s my personal white whale,” she said, opening the curtains of the med lab again.

“Right.”

She looked through the window. Barry was standing in front of his Flash suit, his arms wrapped around himself and his head drooping. He’d lost his speed before, and gotten it back, but she knew he always worried that this would be the last time.

Cisco stepped up next to him and said something quiet. Barry’s shoulders softened, and he glanced over to smile at his friend. Cisco grinned brightly back, asked something, and made a small breaching motion with his hand. Probably offering a ride home. Barry nodded.

She glanced over at Caitlin, who was scribbling something onto her paper with a frown line between her brows. The other woman glanced up, gave her a brief smile, and dove back into her calculations again.

Big picture, Caitlin had said. Iris looked at the big picture.

Well, yes. Of course she did. How could you see what was coming in the distance if you didn’t?

She narrowed her eyes at nothing, wondering how big the picture would have to be before they figured out what DeVoe was planning.

She made herself let that go. Right now the big picture that she could see included the speed humming in her bones. Even if it didn’t feel like it belonged to her, it _was_ there, for who knew how long. She had to go home, rest up her healing leg, and come back here in the morning, ready to be the speedster that the city needed while Barry was out of commission.

Barry came in. “Hey,” he said to Iris. “Ready to go?”

“The Cisco Express is about to leave the station,” Cisco added, coming in after.

“Caitlin?” Iris asked. “Am I clear to leave?”

“Oh!” She looked up. “Yes, go on. When you get home, elevate that leg. And call me if something doesn’t feel right, okay?”

“Of course,” Barry said.

“And don’t forget to eat. Want more nutrient bars?” She got up and opened a cabinet.

“No!” Iris yelped.

Cisco said, “Hey.”

“No, that’s fine, we’ll order out,” Barry said, helping Iris off the bed.

"Golden Dragon," Iris said. "Please?"

"Of course," he said. "My usual?"

His usual was an amount of food that would send a family of twelve into a calorie coma. "That sounds fantastic." She glanced over at Caitlin. "You’re going home too, right?"

“Hmm? Sure. I just want to test some things out first.” She shut the cabinet and went back to her computer, frowning. “Night, you guys.”

Iris eyed her, doubtful. But the familiar whoosh of Cisco’s breach distracted her. When Barry helped her through into their own living room, she headed right for the couch and carefully dropped into its fluffy cushions.

Something bumped her hip. She said, “Ow,” but not too loudly because Barry would panic instead of calling out for delivery and she really wanted about fifty potstickers, immediately if not sooner. She shifted cushions until she found her laptop, left there after a Netflix binge.

When was the last time she’d used it for anything else?

She eyed it, then moved it onto the table next to the lamp and dropped her head back against the back of the couch and let out a gusty sigh.

It really had been a hell of a day.

FINIS


End file.
